IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ris/ejessy/0075.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

From Individual Wellbeing to Economic Welfare. The Scitovsky Contribution to the Explanation of a Joyless Economy

Author

Listed:
  • Di Giovinazzo, Viviana

    (University of Macerata and Université Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne)

Abstract

This paper analyzes Tibor Scitovsky's attempt to solve the paradox of consumers' dissatisfaction in welfare societies. My research concentrate on Scitovsky's ground-breaking book, The Joyless Economy (1992a[1976]) which has been the first book to apply theories of neuropsychology to questions of consumer behavior in clear, non-technical language. When explaining the neurological basis of creative innovation, Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy apparently suggests just some devices for consumer's satisfaction; actually it lays the foundations for an economic theory where novelty is the key element to assess the utility value and knowledge is the means to gain more novelty.

Suggested Citation

  • Di Giovinazzo, Viviana, 2008. "From Individual Wellbeing to Economic Welfare. The Scitovsky Contribution to the Explanation of a Joyless Economy," European Journal of Economic and Social Systems, Lavoisier, vol. 21(1), pages 57-81.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:ejessy:0075
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ejess.revuesonline.com/article.jsp?articleId=12873
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Castellani, Marco & Di Giovinazzo, Viviana & Novarese, Marco, 2010. "Procedural rationality and happiness," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 376-383, June.
    2. Viviana Di Giovinazzo, 2010. "Towards an alternative paradigm of consumer behavior," Working Papers 179, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics, revised Mar 2010.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Novelty; Arousal; Stimulating Activities; Comfort; Boredom; Knowledge; Culture;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General
    • I30 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:ejessy:0075. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Stefano Lucarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://ejess.revuesonline.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.